Bao (film)

In Toronto, Canada, a Chinese-Canadian woman is suffering from empty nest syndrome as her husband is busy at work. She makes a steamed bun that comes alive before she starts to eat it and begins to cry like an infant. She raises the steamed bun as a child, feeding it meals. Eventually the child wishes to play soccer with the other kids, despite his mother's protection. As her son ages into a teenager and a young adult, he increasingly wants independence, while his mother wishes for more attention from him, feeling ignored. When the steamed bun introduces his new fiancée and announces his intentions to move out of his mother's house, his mother protests. The mother tries to stop the steamed bun from leaving, but he pulls free. In a fit of anger, the mother eats the steamed bun, after which she cries over what she has done. Later, the mother lies in bed, weeping, and her real son enters the room, revealing that the whole sequence was an allegorical dream. The son, resembling the steamed bun, is told by his father to apologize to his mother, as she ignores him. He enters the room, offering the same treat the mother gave the steamed bun, and as they share it, they both cry. Afterwards, the whole family, including the son's fiancée, make steamed buns, as they sit at the table watching television.

Bao acts as a story about food and family and how the two come together to form a "potent emotional resonance".[2] Considering the empty nest syndrome presented by the mother character, Shi had to relate her own experiences as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. In making the mother the main character, Shi places herself in her mother's shoes to show her emotional journey as she dedicates her life to raising a child who is now gone. She comes to coddle her steamed bun child who has to grow up. Shi presents the idea of a primal love where you would destroy something so that it won't go away.[2] Here it is the mother loving something so much, she doesn't want to let it go anywhere, even outside her own body.

The short is also culturally significant for its authentic portrayal of diverse characters. Shi, as a Chinese-Canadian artist with exposure to many different styles of art, animation and film, as well as Chinese immigrant communities, portrays very diverse characters.[2] Using this very Chinese-Canadian story regarding its food, characters and themes, Shi tells the stories of the people around her.

A plate of baozi

Bao was directed by Domee Shi and produced by Becky Neiman-Cobb.[3][4] Bao was the first of 35 Pixar shorts to be directed by a woman, made more significant because of Pixar's stigma as being a "boys' club" as well as the fact that the animation industry is male-dominated as a whole.[2] Shi first began working on Bao as a storywriter on the film, Inside Out, and says she wanted to work creatively on a project on her own.[5] The earliest sketches of Bao date back to January 2014, when Shi began work on it as a side project, drawing inspiration from classic fairy tales and her experience as an only child. It began as a brainstorm of different steamed bun ideas and characters with Shi recalling, "This image popped into my head of this mom nuzzling her little baby steamed bun to death, and I had to draw it down."[2] Having been an only child while growing up in Toronto, she identified herself with the metaphor of the "overprotected little steamed bun."[6] Shi worked on Bao alone for 2 years before bringing in a crew.[2]

Animation being a visual device, it was decided early on in production that Bao would be a project with no dialogue. As a story that needed to be understood universally by audiences, Bao needed to relate it with acting, emotion and actions, but no language, which was true to the Chinese culture, in which love is expressed through actions and not words. The only recorded dialogue in the short film is a scene in which the Father is watching TV. The Mandarin dialogue in the details of that scene is an homage to old Cantonese soap operas that Shi watched with her mother growing up.[5]

The Mother character eating the steamed bun was one of the first choices made when creating the film. She wants to keep the steamed bun character to herself so bad that she eats it, though she regrets it immediately. This was itself based on something Shi's mother would say: "Oh I wish I could put you back in my stomach so I knew exactly where you were at all times."[6] Shi herself had frustrations while growing up about being coddled so she talked to her mom as well as other parents to see the other perspective. Shi very much uses the short to step outside of her own point of view in order to identify with the mother who is the main character. It was told with the theme of primal love, as Shi explains, "the type of love you would destroy so it would not disappear and go away."[6]

One of the main reasons Shi wanted to tell the story of Bao was her Asian influences combined with a lack of Asian-American media. Having growing up watching Studio Ghibli films and having always been exposed to Asian cinema and animation, she draws from many Asian influences. And although not typical Pixar fare, Shi found that executives were very receptive to her ideas, getting behind a story that was very Asian-Canadian- and Asian-American-specific.[6] This was rooted in the view that though the film was culturally specific there were universal themes of parents learning to let go of their children as well as families being bound together by food. Shi herself had doubts regarding the short: she was worried about the cultural specificity and that the ending was too dark and would be out of place for a Pixar film. While Shi almost changed it be a watered down version, she pitched it to Pete Docter, a mentor of Shi's as well as an executive producer on Bao. He pushed Shi to pitch the darker one and stay true her original weird idea and storytell in the style she wanted to. "Don't be afraid to push it, be as culturally specific as you want it to be."[6] Staying true to her vision, Shi notes that Bao turned out exactly as it would have if she did it on her own.

Although Shi did go with the darker ending that she had anticipated, there were multiple different drafts of the way that the ending would be properly executed. She wanted to portray this idea of the mother eating her steamed bun child, but in a way where it was both viscerally appropriate for children and with a clear motive. Shi claims that earlier drafts of the scene contained more disturbing images. One draft in particular showed the Mother actually chewing on the steamed bun for a couple of moments while crying before swallowing her son. Shi explained how she would show this particular version to others and "they would be really, really upset by it."[7] Shi took this feedback and created the final produced version that made it into the short in which the Mother takes the steamed bun and swallows the son in one gulp without chewing, in order to show "a quick crime of passion"[7] rather than a more prolonged moment that focused on the action itself.

Domee Shi went on to say how Bao was an example of a children's story that involved darker elements and themes that she believed were important. The short film itself was Shi's modern-day interpretation of some of the darker themed folk tales that inspired her, stories such as The Gingerbread Man and other Asian fables about finding babies in food like peaches. She wanted to experiment with these idea since she "always loved how they play with light and dark elements. These little characters are so cute, but the world wants to eat them."[7] Shi believes that children's films need to introduce more of these themes and show them as equally as these lighter elements of storytelling. She wants children to be able to understand how common dark elements are in day to day and equip them with the tools they need for the real world.

Although Bao was greenlit in 2015, Shi knew it would be a long and uncertain journey, equating shorts films to an indie wing of Pixar, which would have to borrow people who are free for a couple weeks at a time in between feature films. Bao thus had to be worked on more slowly, creatively and flexibly, with the production only finding out that it would be paired with Incredibles 2 a year before release: a fitting match as they remain thematically similar in celebrating moms. The short film format also acted as a challenge for Shi, having to fit an eight-minute time frame.[6] This forced her to be economic as opposed to presenting excessive shots of food. More importantly, Shi emphasizes the importance of diverse stories across all mediums, including animation. Filmmakers and artists need to continuously push and challenge themselves creatively and tell unique stories. In order to tell unique stories, Shi says you can't draw from the same wells, which Studios, and especially Pixar and Disney, understand. This leads to valuing utilizing talented, diverse employees and filmmakers to be "ahead of the curve" and to "tell unique stories".[6]

Bao as a short film also signifies the shifting climate of the animation industry and the interest in telling more stories of diversity and other perspectives. Shi believes that the 2015 short Sanjay's Super Team and the 2017 feature film Coco, both animated Pixar films about different cultures, paved a way for her short film to be released and paired up with Incredibles 2.[8]

The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 21, 2018, and subsequently accompanied Incredibles 2 in theaters.[4][9] Prior to the Christmas holiday in 2018, Pixar made Bao freely available to stream on YouTube for a week, the first time that the studio has offered a short in this manner.[10]

In The Verge's review of Incredibles 2, Tasha Robinson described Bao as an "extremely emotional little film" and a "perfect complement" to the main feature.[11] Inkoo Kang of Slate called the film a "moving encapsulation of the Asian-immigrant experience".[12] Jess Lee for Digital Spy said that the film "hit extremely close to home", but added that the story has "universal themes which should resonate with most cultures".[13]

Petrana Radulovic of Polygon says the film was well received by "many" Asian Americans, although some non-Asian viewers found the short confusing.[14][15]

• Official website at Pixar
• Bao on IMDb